Africa seldom turns out to be what you had expected. Monkey jungles, redolent of jasmine and rife with boomslangs and pythons, are more prevalent in film than in fact. Those mad wildebeest migrations through verdant savannas have short seasons and long lines of tourist buses. Much of the subcontinent is uninhabitable wasteland. Never enough water, never enough rain. And the feline predators that gave a nice, fearful edge to the traditional African experience are increasingly manifest as urban purse snatchers and petty thieves.

But plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose: No sooner do you arrive at a conclusion about Africa than a glaring exception presents itself—Botswana's Okavango Delta is a huge Garden of Eden enclave in a stable country with a small, gracious population.

From the air, the Okavango looks like the world's largest golf course, with strategically placed palms, mammoth water hazards and perpetually cloudless skies. On the ground, it still resembles a golf course, and the number of high-end safari camps over millions of marsh acres testifies to the accuracy of the image. This is Africa at its easiest and most accessible: abundant water, abundant wildlife, negative microbus tourism and relatively few flying insects.

Then came Silvio Rech, a fourth-generation Italian–South African craftsman and his designer wife, Lesley Carstens, with a revolutionary approach to bush camp building. "Adventure architecture" is how Rech describes their innovative visions, as well as the cultural mix and communal efforts it takes to make them real. "We meet with the local chief and make a deal for the loan of tribal craftsmen and laborers," he explains. "It's a transfer of skills. We—Lesley and I and the African craftsmen who travel the world with us— live on-site during the process. We learn from the indigenous people, and they learn from us. Eventually we move on to new projects. The people stay to maintain the project and to create new ones of their own."

"This is a renaissance endeavor," adds Carstens. "All hands-on, living in the bush. Silvio and I design together and work together to build what we design. It's the most rewarding life."

One of their most recently realized visions is Jao Camp, deep in the Okavango. It was commissioned by Kingsley Mogalakwe and Dave Kays—scion of an old and revered Botswana family—and his wife, Cathy, who participated in the creation. In effect, the camp is a series of timber walkways—from guest cottage to guest cottage to a central dining and recreation area—firmly balanced on gumwood stilts, hovering above a small island that comes and goes with the shallow seasonal floods. "We brought the support poles from the outside so as not to compromise the forest," says Rech. "The same with the rosewood, our essential material. Leadwood is the only timber we harvested locally, and that was from trees the elephants had knocked down."

The views, particularly at sundown, are serene rather than spectacular, the wildlife unrivaled in variety and number. Indeed, the scene smacks somewhat of a Peaceable Kingdom tableau. The hippo consorting with the crocodile. In the same lagoon, the splay-hoofed sitatunga. And one of the largest elephant populations on earth. From October to March the waters recede to reveal an endless floodplain. It's big-cat country now—game viewing at its best and most convenient. From the comfort of a sala, you can track a black-maned lion across a papyrus clearing. Cheetahs and leopards are plentiful, as are tsessebe, red lechwe and wildebeests. There's the rarer kudu and sable antelope, and plains game by the thousands.

Jao Camp accommodates 18 guests in nine meticulously rusticated, luxury huts. Enthusiastically African, they feature thick timbers complexly planed and joined without nails by Zanzibar boatbuilders. Each hut has a roughly thatched roof, primitive interior detailing and collapsible canvas walls designed to admit the sounds and essences of Africa. En suite facilities include an outsize claw-and-ball bathtub, a flush toilet, pottery basins and a daringly unshrouded outdoor shower that's become de rigueur from Kenya's Northern Frontier District to South Africa's Drakensberg. Some of the furniture is Balinese; most of it, however, was designed by Rech and Carstens and crafted by Malawi carvers exclusively for Jao Camp.

Thus Frank Lloyd Wright, Rech's favorite American architect, meets Edgar Rice Burroughs in an engaging fusion of functional comfort amid eminent entropy. The pervasive concept of Jao Camp suggests a civilized visit to tribal Africa and the old-fashioned safari. It speaks directly to an American's sense of tree house adventure: being thoroughly secure while living simultaneously in and outside of nature.

There is an exquisite pool near an open-air pavilion, an area with a campfire for dining under the stars. Dinner might begin with water chestnut and Kalahari truffle velouté. Then ostrich fillet wrapped in watercress, peppadew and crepinette. A Porcupine Ridge merlot. The Mulderbosch Steen-op-Hout with a superb mangosteen crème brulée. A marula tree fruit nightcap. Jao cuisine, like Jao Camp, combines the best of two Africas—that of the timeless treewhere-man-was-born and an evolved Continental presence that predates the settlement of the New World.

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